With less than a month to go until King Charles’coronation, more details have been released about how the day will unfold and what he and Camilla, soon to be crowned queen, will wear.
The ceremony, which is set for May 6 at Westminster Abbey, will follow a grand procession that will start from Buckingham Palace, officials announced on Sunday.
King Charles and Camilla will travel to the abbey in the Diamond Jubilee Coach pulled by six Windsor Grey horses, according to the palace press release.
It’s the same carriage that was created for Queen Elizabeth II’s 60th anniversary on the throne in 2012.
The procession will pass by Admiralty Arch and run along Parliament Street before arriving at Westminster Abbey, where the coronation service will kick off at 11 a.m. British time (6 a.m. Eastern).
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After the coronation is complete, another procession will follow the same route back to Buckingham Palace.
For that, a heavier Gold State Coach will be drawn by eight horses. That carriage has been used at every coronation since 1831.
To wrap up the day’s festivities, the couple will be greeted upon their return to Buckingham Palace with a royal salute by members from the British armed forces and representatives from Commonwealth militaries followed by three cheers from the assembled service personnel.
‘Not my King!’: Anti-royal protesters greet Charles and Camilla at York cathedral
What will Charles and Camilla wear?
In addition to the procession routes, the palace also revealed details about the crown jewels that will be on display as the king and queen are crowned.
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King Charles will wear a ring composed of a sapphire with a ruby cross set in diamonds.
His orb will be made of gold and divided into three sections with bands of jewels. He will use two different sceptres.
FILE – The Koh-i-noor, or “mountain of light,” diamond, set in the Maltese Cross at the front of the crown made for Britain’s late Queen Mother Elizabeth, is seen on her coffin, along with her personal standard, a wreath and a note from her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, as it is drawn to London’s Westminster Hall, April 5, 2002.
AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File
As per tradition and as previously announced, the king will wear St Edward’s crown at the coronation service in Westminster Abbey.
It is the same crown his mother wore at her coronation in 1953.
It has a purple velvet cap and an ermine band. The crown’s gold frame is set with rubies, amethysts, sapphires, garnet, topazes and tourmalines.
At the end of the coronation service, Charles will swap that with the Imperial State Crown, which is also fitted with a purple velvet cap and an ermine band and adorned with jewels.
Meanwhile, Camilla’s ring is a ruby in gold setting.
As previously announced, she has chosen to wear Queen Mary’s Crown, which is undergoing some minor changes and additions ahead of the coronation.
London — Britain’s Prince Harry was back in the U.K. Monday for an unannounced appearance at the country’s High Court as legal proceedings began in a privacy case in which the prince and six others are suing the Associated Newspapers group, which publishes the Daily Mail tabloid. Harry, the California-based youngest son of King Charles III, is among the high-profile figures, including singer Elton John, who brought the action against the newspaper group claiming “gross breaches of privacy.”
The well-known litigants claim to have “highly distressing evidence that they have been the victims of abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy by Associated Newspapers,” according to an October 2022 statement from Hamlins, the law firm representing the group.
Britain’s Prince Harry leaves the Royal Courts Of Justice in London, March 27, 2023.
Alberto Pezzali/AP
The alleged breaches of privacy include the hacking of cell phone messages, deceitfully obtaining medical records, bribing police officials, and illegally accessing bank records, the statement said.
Associated Newspapers (not to be confused with the U.S.-based Associated Press news agency) has denied the allegations, calling them “preposterous smears” and “unsubstantiated and highly defamatory claims,” according to the BBC.
Harry is already locked in a separate legal battle with Associated Newspapers, having filed a libel suit over an article published by the Mail on Sunday tabloid under the headline, “Revealed: How Harry tried to keep his legal fight over bodyguards secret.” Two years ago he also accepted an apology and damages from the publisher over other articles in a separate libel lawsuit.
Harry’s return to London is believed to be the first by the Duke of Sussex since the funeral of his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II in September last year, and it comes amid questions over whether Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, will attend King Charles’ coronation ceremony in early May.
U.K. media outlets said Harry was not expected to see his father or his older brother William, the Prince of Wales, during his visit to the U.K. this week. Kensington Palace, the official residence of heir-to-the-throne Prince William, said the prince and his family were away from the London area this week as many schools were out for the Easter holiday.
Speculation about whether Harry and or Meghan will attend the king’s coronation ramped up after news broke that the couple had been asked to vacate their U.K. residence on the grounds of Windsor Castle earlier this month.
The pair gave up their status as senior, “working” royals amid tension with other members of Harry’s family that played out in spectacularly public fashion, through interviews and a tell-all book by Harry claiming racism and mistreatment.
“Nothing was okay,” Harry said of his relationship with his family in a “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper when his memoir, titled “Spare,” came out.
King Charles’s state visit to France has been postponed amid planned protests over the French government’s controversial pension reforms.
Both France’s Élysée Palace and Buckingham Palace confirmed the trip had been shelved on Friday morning.
The British monarch and Queen Consort were supposed to visit the country from Sunday through Wednesday, and they would have traveled to Paris and the southwestern city of Bordeaux. However a decision to postpone the visit was made after demonstrations turned violent in some areas, including Bordeaux, on Thursday.
Clashes between groups of protesters angry over proposed pension reforms and police broke out after workers staged a national strike throughout Thursday, with flare-ups in Paris and regional capitals. In Bordeaux, demonstrators set fire to the entrance of the city hall during skirmishes with police, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
The Élysée Palace said in a statement that the King’s state visit “will be rescheduled as soon as possible.”
“In view of yesterday’s announcement of a new national day of action against pension reform on Tuesday, March 28 in France, the visit of King Charles III, originally scheduled for March 26-29 in our country, will be postponed,” the statement read.
“This decision was taken by the French and British governments, after a telephone exchange between the President of the Republic and the King this morning, in order to be able to welcome His Majesty King Charles III in conditions that correspond to our friendly relationship,” it continued.
A Buckingham Palace spokesperson confirmed the postponement to CNN, adding: “Their Majesties greatly look forward to the opportunity to visit France as soon as dates can be found.”
A UK government spokesperson also confirmed the King would not travel to France next week, adding that “this decision was taken with the consent of all parties, after the President of France asked the British Government to postpone the visit.”
Charles and Camilla were due to travel from France to Germany on Wednesday for a state visit. The second leg of the trip is still expected to go ahead.
King Charles III marked his brother Prince Edward’s birthday by giving him a new title. Already the Earl of Wessex and Forfar, Edward was given the title of Duke of Edinburgh, Buckingham Palace announced Friday.
Prince Edward, who turned 59 on Friday, is the youngest of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s children. The Dukedom of Edinburgh was last held by his father, Prince Philip, who was given the title when he married then-Princess Elizabeth, who was then the Duchess of Edinburgh. She then became the queen in 1952.
When Elizabeth died in September 2022, her eldest son Charles immediately became the king. Edward will hold the Duke of Edinburgh title for the rest of his life, the statement from the royal family said.
🎉 Wishing the new Duke of Edinburgh a very Happy Birthday today!
The King has conferred the Dukedom of Edinburgh upon his brother, Prince Edward, on his 59th birthday.
Prince Edward was first given the Earl of Wessex title when he married his wife, Sophie Rhys-Jones, in 1999, and the Earl of Forfar title in 2019 when he turned 55.
Only four other members of the royal family have had the Dukedom of Edinburgh bestowed upon them: Prince Frederick, King George II’s son, who was the first to hold the title (1726), Prince William, King George III’s brother (1764), Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s son (1866), and Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband (1947).
Britain’s Prince Edward, King Charles III and Prince William (left to right) arrive for the Committal Service of Queen Elizabeth II at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Sept. 19, 2022.
Justin Setterfield/AP
Although Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, moved to the U.S. and stepped down as “working” members of the family, they have kept their titles, as has King Charles’ other brother Prince Andrew, despite having many of his formal honors and patronages removed by the family in the wake of his legal battle over alleged sexual abuse.
Prince Harry, who is fifth in line to the throne after his brother, Prince William and William’s children. Harry and Meghan’s children follow him in the line of succession. Harry’s young children Archie and Lilibet have taken the titles of prince and princess, which they have been entitled to since their grandfather ascended the throne late last year.
Eighth in line after the Sussex children is Prince Andrew. Prince Edward, the newly named Duke of Edinburgh, is 13th in line.
Last year, King Charles III made a move to allow his youngest siblings — Prince Edward and Princess Anne — to stand in for him.
Traditionally the four most senior royals and the sovereign’s spouse can fill in for the monarch. When Charles became king, that list included his wife, Camilla, Queen Consort; his sons, Prince William and Prince Harry; his brother, Prince Andrew; and his niece, Princess Beatrice. Charles included his younger sister and brother because both Harry and Andrew have left their roles as senior working royals.
Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have received an invite to the coronation of King Charles III – but the couple have yet to confirm if they will attend, the Duke’s spokesperson told CNN on Sunday.
“I can confirm The Duke has recently received email correspondence from His Majesty’s office regarding the coronation,” the spokesperson said. “An immediate decision on whether The Duke and Duchess will attend will not be disclosed by us at this time.”
King Charles and his wife, Queen Consort Camilla, will be crowned on May 6 at Westminster Abbey.
The coronation will see three days of celebrations across the country in which the public will be invited to participate.
Buckingham Palace said the coronation itself will be “a solemn religious service, as well as an occasion for celebration and pageantry,” that reflects “the Monarch’s role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in longstanding traditions.”
That line has been interpreted by experts as a hint that Charles’ coronation will be different and more subdued than the one his late mother experienced seven decades ago, with a shorter ceremony and amendments to some of the more feudal elements of the ritual.
At this point, the palace has not specified which members of the family will appear in a procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, and on the balcony of the palace at the end of the day alongside the King and Queen Consort.
It follows Prince Andrew’s continued exile from public life as a result of historical sexual abuse allegations and the publication of Prince Harry’s memoir, which railed against his family.
Harry has previously declined to be drawn on whether his family will return for his father’s coronation.
“The door is always open,” he said in a January interview with Britain’s ITV to publicize his book. “The ball is in their court. There’s a lot to be discussed and I really hope that they’re willing to sit down and talk about it.”
On Wednesday, the spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex told CNN the couple had been asked to vacate Frogmore Cottage, their official UK residence.
Buckingham Palace said Wednesday it would be offering no comment. A royal source told CNN that any such discussions would be a private family matter.
The sacred oil that will be used to anoint King Charles III at his coronation May 6, has been consecrated at a Christian holy site in Jerusalem, Buckingham Palace has announced.
The “chrism oil” was created using olives harvested from two groves on the Mount of Olives, a mountain ridge to the east of Jerusalem’s Old City, which holds religious importance to Christians.
Olives from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene and the Monastery of the Ascension were pressed just outside Bethlehem, where Christians believe Jesus was born, according to a statement.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said he wanted to see a new oil produced from the olives from the Mount of Olives since planning for the coronation began.
“This demonstrates the deep historic link between the Coronation, the Bible and the Holy Land. From ancient kings through to the present day, monarchs have been anointed with oil from this sacred place. As we prepare to anoint The King and The Queen Consort, I pray that they would be guided and strengthened by the Holy Spirit,” he said in the statement.
On coronation day, the Archbishop of Canterbury will perform the anointing service, a duty which has been undertaken by the post since 1066.
A ceremony at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, saw the consecration of the oil on Friday. It was held by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilos III, and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, The Most Reverend Hosam Naoum. Christians believe Jesus was crucified where the Holy Sepulchre now stands.
Charles’ coronation oil is based on the centuries-old formula used in his mother, Queen Elizabeth II’s anointment in 1953, but with some important differences.
The late Queen’s coronation oil included a concoction of orange, rose, cinnamon, musk and ambergris oils. Ambergris is a substance that originates from the intestine of the sperm whale.
The King’s sacred mix is made of oils of sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin, amber and orange blossom – without any ingredients from animals.
It will also be used to anoint Camilla, the Queen Consort, the statement added.
Prince Harry is sitting down for another chat about his bestselling and controversial memoir, Spare, and this time he’ll be speaking with a Hungarian-Canadian doctor.
Harry will join Canadian physician, author and trauma expert Gabor Maté for an “intimate conversation,” and the public can purchase tickets for the virtual event and submit questions for the prince to answer.
Join us on Saturday, March 4th for a virtual live conversation between Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex and Dr. Gabor Maté, renowned speaker and author of THE MYTH OF NORMAL: TRAUMA, ILLNESS, AND HEALING IN A TOXIC CULTURE. pic.twitter.com/4CpLloLwdT
Maté is a renowned addiction expert and the author of the recently published book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. He, like Harry, is a bestselling author. His writings cover childhood development, the physical and mental impacts of stress, ADHD and addiction.
The one-hour interview will be livestreamed the morning of March 4, starting at 9 a.m. PT, from an undisclosed location.
Maté tweeted about the event late last week, encouraging royal watchers to buy their ticket by March 1 for a chance to have a submitted question asked during the event.
Register by March 1 to submit a question, and you may see it answered live! Access is open to residents of most countries—visit https://t.co/DaBkzlLTa7 for tickets. #PrinceHarryMemoir
According to Vanity Fair, the pair will “discuss the difficulties of living with loss, as well as the importance of personal healing.”
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There are two levels of ticket pricing: $45.38 includes a copy of Spare, while $82.82 includes both Spare and Maté’s latest book.
Maté, 79, is considered one of the world’s leading voices advocating for alternative addiction treatment and has been a longtime supporter of the decriminalization of drugs.
His promotion of and use of the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat mental illness landed him with a warning in 2011. The drug is illegal in Canada, and Health Canada officials threatened to have him arrested if he didn’t stop using ayahuasca to treat his patients.
Last month, Harry’s Spare became an instant bestseller around the globe, capturing the number one position of the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list for six consecutive weeks. More than 1.4 million units of the English-language copy were sold on the first day it was available, making it the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time.
Copies of the new book by Prince Harry called “Spare” are displayed at Sherman’s book store in Freeport, Maine, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023.
Robert F. Bukaty / The Associated Press
Prince Harry has been clear about why he wrote the book, telling People last month: “My hope has been to turn my pain into purpose, so if sharing my experience makes a positive difference in someone’s life, well, I can’t think of anything more rewarding than that.
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“This book and its truths are in many ways a continuation of my own mental health journey. It’s a raw account of my life — the good, the bad and everything in between,” he continued.
Prince Harry says he tried to step back from royal duties privately, but there were leaks and stories planted
The release of the book last month, coupled with four promotional interviews given by the prince to various news outlets and talk shows, saw a division of opinion. Many were critical of his decision to publish so many intimate and, at times, unflattering details of life inside the British Royal Family. Others applauded him for his honesty and willingness to exposed the toxic relationship between Buckingham Palace and the U.K.’s tabloid media.
His interviews also focused on his strained relationship with his family, accusing members of his family of getting “into bed with the devil” to gain favourable tabloid coverage, claiming his stepmother Camilla, the queen consort, had leaked private conversations to the media and saying his family was “complicit” in his wife Meghan’s “pain and suffering.”
Harry insists he wants to salvage what remains of his relationship with his brother and father, King Charles III, but some have pointed out that airing his family’s dirty laundry in such a public — and furious — fashion might have the opposite effect.
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Everett R. Berryman Jr. was 11 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in public schools illegal.
But supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Berryman was attending public school, had no intention of complying. Five years later, in 1959, as Berryman was looking ahead to attending 7th grade, the county shuttered all public schools and opened a private school – for White children only. It would take five years, an intervention by the Department of Justice and another Supreme Court order, before integrated public schooling in Prince Edward County proceeded.
Around the same time, in North Carolina, Dr. E.B. Palmer was working as the executive secretary of state for the North Carolina Teachers Association, advocating for Black teachers after Brown was decided.
“When the school system said ‘separate but equal,’ that was fine,” Palmer recalled to CNN. “But when we moved a little further, they tried to say, ‘We don’t want Black teachers teaching White students.’”
Nearly 40,000 teaching positions held by Black teachers in 17 southern and border states would be lost in the ensuring years, according to Samuel B. Ethridge, a National Education Association official who was a leader in the movement to integrate teacher organizations during the civil rights movement.
Today, Brown v. Board of Education is remembered as a watershed moment in the history of America’s civil rights progress and the fight against systemic racism. But the ruling also had the unintended effect of leaving behind thousands of Black students and educators whose fates were not considered when America moved to reshape its education system.
Berryman and Palmer shared their stories with CNN as part of the “History Refocused” series, which explores surprising and personal stories from America’s past that may bring new understanding of today’s conflicts.
The Supreme Court officially struck down the legal basis for segregated classrooms in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a second, follow-up ruling a year later outlined the process for implementing school desegregation. In “Brown II,” the Supreme Court ordered district courts to enforce desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” reasoning that such language would provide local authorities with time to adjust to the new law of the land.
Instead, those opposed to desegregation exploited the terms, including officials in Prince Edward County, who figured that by starving the local public school system of funding, they could do an end-run around the high court’s order by opening a private – and all-White – school.
“Even in cases where White children or White families rather could not afford to attend the school, they even charged as little as a dollar to allow White students to attend school,” Dawn Williams, dean of Howard University’s School of Education, told CNN. “Now, for the Black community – something totally different for the Black community. There were no forms of public schooling.”
To combat the lack of educational opportunities, members of the Black community in the area created a grassroots community center, which also served as a makeshift school, but it was not the real thing.
Two years into the lockout, the Berryman family looked for other ways to keep their children in school. They tried to enroll their children in the neighboring county of Appomattox, Virginia, only to find out that they had to live in the county and present a valid address to do so. The next step was to move in with a family friend.
At that point, Berryman was a 14-year-old who stood 6-foot-2 but was still in 7th grade, when he should have been in the 9th grade had he not missed out on years of public schooling.
“I was the tallest guy in the whole school,” he recalled.
Eventually, the Supreme Court had to become involved again. In 1964, it ruled that the time for desegregating schools “with all deliberate speed” had passed and that there was no justification for “denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia.”
Berryman and his family returned to Prince Edward County when the public schools reopened, and he remembered feeling “happy to be back home.” But there were constant reminders of the toll taken on the Black community.
“We ran across students – all students were with us that hadn’t been in school for going on five years. And some of the students here began school at 10 years old. … And on the upper end, we had guys and girls graduating high school at 21 and 22 years old,” Berryman said. “So we had – it was like a kaleidoscope of pupils every which way in this grand scheme of school opening again.”
Brown was intended to protect education opportunities for students. It didn’t say anything about teachers whose jobs would be soon jeopardized by school integration, when Black students often moved to White facilities that had superior conditions.
In the wake of Brown, various tactics were used across the nation to undercut Black teachers and educators, from outright dismissals or demotions to forcing teachers to teach unfamiliar subjects or grades – making it easier to fire them based on poor performance.
In Alabama, tenure rules were rewritten in several counties and teachers believed they were dismissed because of their participation in the civil rights movement, the NEA found in a 1965 report. North Carolina and South Carolina repealed their teachers’ continuing contract laws.
“I had to spend day and night traveling all over the state following behind complaints of Black teachers being dismissed where schools were being desegregated,” recalled Palmer, the former official with the North Carolina Teachers Association.
Ethridge, writing in the Negro Educational Review in 1979, found that by the mid-1970s, 39,386 teaching positions had been lost by Black teachers as a result of desegregation in 17 states, mostly in the South. In the 1970-71 school year alone, the cumulative loss in income to the Black community in those states totaled $240,564,911, the NAACP found.
“The cumulative amount is staggering to the imagination,” Ethridge wrote in his research, noting that even as the Black student population grew in those years, the number of Black teachers decreased in those states.
The Black teaching force has never recovered from the tremendous losses. In the 2017-18 school year, even though Whites accounted for less than half of the students in public schools – the result of a steady increase in diversity over the last 30 years – White teachers made up 79% of the workforce, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 87% three decades earlier. The percentage of public school Black teachers – 7% in 2017-18 – decreased one percentage point over that same time period.
“Sadly, the reasons for this disparity go far back, and a key impetus happened just as the nation attempted to fix our public education system,” Williams said.
A childhood letter written by King Charles to his “granny” has been discovered by a couple living in Warwickshire, England, as they cleared out their attic during the Christmas break.
“Dear Granny, I am sorry that you are ill. I hope you will be better soon,” the letter reads on one side, carefully written on lined Buckingham Palace notepaper and dated March 15, 1955, when the King was six years old.
“Lots of love from Charles,” it says on the other side, alongside colorful kisses and doodled circles.
It was discovered inside an envelope addressed from Queen Elizabeth II to the Queen Mother, providing a “three generation run,” Charles Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers and who is responsible for the sale of the letter, told CNN Thursday.
Finding the letter, which Hanson estimates could fetch as much as £10,000 ($12,000) at auction, left the couple “gobsmacked” as they sifted through their loft.
“It had belonged to my late grandad Roland Stockdale,” the seller, a 49-year-old farm manager who has not been named, said in a statement.
“My wife said ‘wow, look at that!’ We were pretty gobsmacked but we weren’t sure whether anyone would be interested in it.”
Stockdale worked for the Metropolitan Police where he was part of the Queen’s personal protection force during the 1950s after he had left Carlisle, northern England, and his previous job as a farm worker, the seller added.
Stockdale’s folder containing the letter had “been gathering dust” in various attics for “30 to 40 years” as it was passed around family members following his death.
“I have absolutely no idea how he came to have the letter written by King Charles when he was a boy,” the seller said. “It’s one of many things he kept.”
Citing postcards and birthday greetings that Stockdale received from the Queen and Queen Mother, Hanson hypothesized that “these keepsakes were gifted to the officer” since he “was clearly so highly regarded.”
The couple found other royal memorabilia in the folder, including an invitation to a dance at Balmoral Castle, a note signed by the Queen Mother, gift tags signed by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, as well as a copy of the Queen’s 1956 Christmas broadcast.
Britain’s King Charles III has enlisted the help of acclaimed British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the flagship anthem for his upcoming coronation.
Charles’s coronation will take place on May 6 at Westminster Abbey in London, and will see Camilla, Queen Consort crowned alongside her husband.
The King has personally selected the musical program for the service, which will see “a range of musical styles and performers blend tradition, heritage and ceremony with new musical voices of today,” according to Buckingham Palace.
Twelve new pieces of music have been prepared for the occasion – including six orchestral works, five choral pieces and one organ commission – by several world-renowned composers whose styles include classical, sacred, film, television and musical theater.
Famed composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose hit musicals “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” have been performed around the world, said he was “incredibly honoured” to be involved.
“My anthem includes words slightly adapted from Psalm 98. I have scored it for the Westminster Abbey choir and organ, the ceremonial brass and orchestra,” Lloyd Webber said. “I hope my anthem reflects this joyful occasion.”
A Coronation March has been written by Patrick Doyle, an award-winning Scottish composer best known for his work on films like “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Gosford Park” and “Carlito’s Way.”
One of the more sentimental inclusions from the King is his choice to have Greek Orthodox music played during the service, performed by the Byzantine Chant Ensemble, in tribute to his father, the late Prince Philip, who died two years ago.
Meanwhile, musical themes from countries across the Commonwealth will feature in Iain Farrington’s new solo organ commission. The other new works have been created by Sarah Class, Nigel Hess, Paul Mealor, Tarik O’Regan, Roxanna Panufnik, Shirley J. Thompson, Judith Weir, Roderick Williams, and Debbie Wiseman.
A handpicked gospel choir – The Ascension Choir – is also set to perform as part of the service, in addition to the Choir of Westminster Abbey and the Choir of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace. They will be joined by girl choristers from the Chapel Choir of Methodist College, Belfast and from Truro Cathedral Choir. The traditional “Vivat” acclamations will be proclaimed by the King’s Scholars of Westminster School.
Andrew Nethsingha, organist and master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey, said all coronation services are a blend of “deeply-rooted tradition and contemporary innovation” and praised the new British monarch for “choosing fine musicians and accessible, communicative music for this great occasion.”
The ceremony will also include historic music featured in coronation services over the past four centuries by the likes of William Byrd, George Frideric Handel, Edward Elgar, Henry Walford Davies, William Walton, Hubert Parry and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Antonio Pappano, musical director of the Royal Opera House and conductor of the Coronation Orchestra, said: “His Majesty has chosen a most beautiful and varied programme that I believe will enhance the splendour of this very special celebration.”
Buckingham Palace previously revealed the coronation will be “a solemn religious service, as well as an occasion for celebration and pageantry,” conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.
The three-day weekend at the beginning of May is set to include grand processions through central London, a star-studded concert at Windsor Castle in addition to celebrations across the country. Britons have been given an extra bank holiday and members of the public are being invited to join “The Big Help Out” by volunteering in their communities.
“Everyone is invited to join in, on any day,” Michelle Donelan, UK culture secretary, said in a statement. “Whether that is by hosting a special street party, watching the Coronation ceremony or spectacular concert on TV, or stepping forward during The Big Help Out to help causes that matter to them.”
Buckingham Palace on Saturday revealed details of King Charles III’s coronation that will see three days of celebrations across the country in which the public will be invited to participate.
The coronation will take place on Saturday May 6, a “Coronation Big Lunch” and “Coronation Concert” the following day, and an extra bank holiday on Monday. The public will be invited on the last day to join “The Big Help Out” by volunteering in their communities.
“Everyone is invited to join in, on any day,” Michelle Donelan, UK Secretary for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said in a statement.
“Whether that is by hosting a special street party, watching the Coronation ceremony or spectacular concert on TV, or stepping forward during The Big Help Out to help causes that matter to them.”
The coronation itself will be “a solemn religious service, as well as an occasion for celebration and pageantry,” conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the palace said.
It will, the palace reiterated, “reflect the Monarch’s role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in longstanding traditions and pageantry.”
That line from the palace has been interpreted by experts as a hint that Charles’ coronation will be different and more subdued from the one his late mother experienced seven decades ago, with a shorter ceremony and amendments to some of the feudal elements of the ritual. Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was the first live televised royal event and lasted three hours.
Charles and his wife Camilla, the Queen Consort, will arrive at Westminster Abbey in procession from Buckingham Palace, known as “The King’s Procession,” and return later in a larger ceremonial procession, known as “The Coronation Procession,” accompanied by other members of the royal family.
The King and Queen Consort, alongside members of the royal family, will then appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to conclude the day’s events.
At this point, the palace has not specified which members of the family will appear in the procession and on the balcony, following Prince Andrew’s continued exile from public life as a result of historical sexual abuse allegations and the publication of Prince Harry’s memoir which railed against his family.
“It would help Charles a lot in terms of his image if Harry and Meghan were there,” royal historian Kate Williams previously told CNN. “It’s particularly going to look bad for him if his son is not there because, of course, Harry still is very high in line to the throne, as are his children.”
In a sign that not all Britons will be celebrating the event, anti-monarchy campaign group Republic vowed to protest near Westminster Abbey. “The coronation is a celebration of hereditary power and privilege, it has no place in a modern society,” spokesperson Graham Smith said in a statement.
“At a cost of tens of millions of pounds this pointless piece of theatre is a slap in the face for millions of people struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.
“We have already been in touch with the Metropolitan Police, and we expect them to facilitate peaceful and meaningful protest. We intend to make our presence felt in parliament square as the royal procession passes through to the Abbey.”
The day after the coronation, May 7, thousands of events are expected to take place across the country as part of the “Coronation Big Lunch,” while as-yet unnamed “global music icons and contemporary stars,” will come together for a “Coronation Concert” held on Windsor Castle’s East Lawn, the palace said.
“The Coronation Big Lunch helps you bring the celebration right into your own street or back yard,” said Peter Stewart, Chief Purpose Officer at the event’s organizing body, the Eden Project.
“Sharing friendship, food and fun together gives people more than just a good time – people feel less lonely, make friends and go on to get more involved with their community,” he added in a statement.
The concert will be attended by a public audience composed of volunteers from the King and Queen Consort’s charity affiliations as well as several thousand members of the public selected through a national ballot held by the BBC.
They will watch a “world-class orchestra play interpretations of musical favorites fronted by some of the world’s biggest entertainers, alongside performers from the world of dance…and a selection of spoken word sequences delivered by stars of stage and screen,” the palace said, adding that a line-up would be released in due course.
A diverse group comprised of Britain’s Refugee choirs, NHS choirs, LGBTQ+ singing groups and deaf signing choirs, will form “The Coronation Choir” and also perform at the concert, alongside “The Virtual Choir,” made up of singers from across the Commonwealth.
Well-known locations across the country will also be lit up using projections, lasers, drone displays and illuminations as part of the concert.
The celebrations will conclude on the bank holiday Monday with hundreds of activities planned by local community groups for “The Big Help Out.”
“It is going to be a festival of volunteering,” said Jon Knight, Chief Executive of the Together Coalition.
“The aim is to create a legacy of better-connected communities long beyond the Coronation itself.”
Prince Harry‘s “Spare” sold more than 3.2 million copies worldwide after just one week of publication and will likely rank among the bestselling memoirs of all time.
Penguin Random House announced Thursday that Prince Harry’s headline-making memoir sold 1.6 million copies in the U.S. alone. It’s a number comparable to first week sales for blockbusters such as former President Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land” and former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Becoming,” which has sold more than 17 million copies since coming out in 2018.
The British publisher announced last week that “Spare” sold 400,000 copies in the United Kingdom in all formats — hardback, e-book and audio — on its first day.
The total sales announced for “Spare” are for print, audio and digital editions in the major English-language markets: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. The book has come out in 15 other languages, and editions in 10 additional languages are expected.
Key takeaways from Prince Harry’s explosive memoir ‘Spare’
“Spare” may set records for nonfiction, but no book in memory approaches the pace of the final Harry Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which in 2007 sold more than 10 million copies in its first 24 hours.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, worked on his book with American novelist J.R. Moehringer, who also helped write Andre Agassi’s acclaimed “Open” and is the author of “The Tender Bar,” a memoir adapted by George Clooney into a movie starring Ben Affleck.
After weeks of headline-grabbing leaks and TV interviews, Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir, “Spare,” is finally on bookshelves worldwide. As CBS News correspondent Holly Williams reports, the book is full of startling revelations and bombshell allegations regarding Harry’s brother William, his father King Charles, and the U.K. tabloid media.
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Prince Harry spoke with “60 Minutes” about how members of his family leaked negative stories about him to the British press to improve their own image. He also clarified previous claims about alleged racism in the royal family. Charlie D’Agata has more details.
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Prince Harry’s favourability has fallen to an all-time low amongst Britons just one day ahead of the official release of his autobiography, Spare, new polling has found.
Close to two-thirds (64 per cent) of Brits now have a negative view of Harry, and only a quarter (26 per cent) view him in a favourable light, the YouGov survey has found.
(YouGov is a British internet-based market research and data analytics firm that conducts polls in the U.K. and beyond.)
This latest poll was conducted Jan. 5 and 6 in the days following a number of bombshell claims Harry made against the British Royal Family, which were reported after bookstores in Spain broke Spare’s embargo date and began selling copies of the book early.
Prince Harry’s popularity falls to new record low in run up to ‘Spare’ launch (survey conducted 5-6 Jan)
The latest figures show that in just one month, Harry’s positive opinion rating has dropped seven per cent, while his negative opinion rating has increased by five per cent.
This image provided by the Random House Group shows the cover of “Spare,” Prince Harry’s memoir. The book is an object of obsessive anticipation worldwide since first announced last year, is coming out Jan. 10.
Random House Group
It appears fatigue for the prince and his recent domination of headlines is settling in. Over the past two days, three interviews have aired — on ITV in the U.K., as well as 60 Minutes and Good Morning America in North America — where Harry has further shared revelations and explanations about the book’s contents.
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On the press tour, he’s focused on his strained relationship with his family, accusing members of his family of getting “into bed with the devil” to gain favourable tabloid coverage, claiming his stepmother Camilla, the queen consort, had leaked private conversations to the media and said his family was “complicit” in his wife Meghan’s “pain and suffering.”
He’s also defended his decision to publish his book.
In his interview with GMA’s Michael Strahan Monday morning, Harry said his book is a step forward to finding “peace” with his family.
“I don’t think that we can ever have peace with my family unless the truth is out there. There’s a lot that I can forgive, but there needs to be conversations in order for reconciliation, and part of that has to be accountability,” said Harry.
He later added that he accepts his memoir is “feeding the beast” of media attention but insisted “the only way that I can protect us and the only way that I can correct those mistruths is by writing something, the truth, in one place.”
“I don’t know how staying silent is ever going to make things better,” he echoed while speaking to ITV’s Tom Bradby.
However, while the prince insists he wants to salvage what remains of his relationship with his brother and father, King Charles III, some have pointed out that airing his family’s dirty laundry in such a public, and furious, fashion might have the opposite effect.
Veteran British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, a biographer and friend of Charles, told The Associated Press that Harry’s revelations were the type “that you’d expect … from a sort of B-list celebrity,” and that the king would be hurt by Harry’s disclosures.
‘He’s gone too far’: Prince Harry’s claim of killing 25 people in Afghanistan sparks outrage
He “is doing some gaslighting himself, frankly, because the fact is … here he is selling out his family for money, essentially, when he’s talked so often about the agony of being betrayed,” she told the outlet.
Brown also said Harry was “quite happy” to have the royal palace “spin on his behalf when it suited him,” like when he was using drugs.
“He was doing a tremendous amount of drugs. He was totally out of hand … and yet the palace had to go out and sort of clean up after him and spin and kill stories, and make things go away,” Brown said. “They were always doing that for Harry, so he doesn’t acknowledge that there’s a two-way street here.”
Good Morning Britain host Richard Madeley also spoke out against Harry, after Sunday’s ITV interview where the prince denied accusing the Royal Family of racism in a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey.
In his interview with Bradby on Sunday, Prince Harry was asked about the previous claims he and Meghan made to Oprah.
“No,” Harry interjected. “The British press said that, right? Did Meghan ever mention, ‘they’re racists’?”
“She said there were troubling comments about Archie’s skin colour. Wouldn’t you describe that as essentially racist?” Bradby asked the prince.
Harry replied that he would not describe the incident as racist, “not having lived within that family.”
“The difference between racism and unconscious bias… the two things are different,” he said.
Madeley, however, questioned why Harry allowed the “accusations of racism” against the royal family to continue — especially considering he and Meghan had plenty of platforms to correct the issue.
.@itvnews Royal Editor @chrisshipitv discusses Prince Harry’s interview that aired on ITV1 last night.
He reacts to Harry’s comments that he didn’t accuse the royal family of racism. pic.twitter.com/uKpgJ6StJA
“If we misunderstood it overnight and it was the front page story in the world, why didn’t they correct it?” he asked. “Why didn’t anybody, why didn’t Harry or Meghan say at some point on one of their podcasts or all the opportunities that they’ve had and say, ‘Oh, by the way, we didn’t mean it the way you guys took it, we weren’t accusing the family of racism?’”
“It was never corrected. It was corrected last night, but two-and-a-half, three years too late. You can’t have it both ways, Harry. I’m sorry, you can’t.”
Despite the critics, however, Harry insists that Spare is a last resort. When speaking to Anderson Cooper of 60 Minutes Sunday, Harry said he was continuing to speak out publicly because “every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife.”
And although many have criticized Harry for sharing so many deeply intimate and dysfunctional details about his family, others have applauded him speaking up.
Jessica MacNair, a professional counsellor, told USA Today that Harry is showing courage by sharing his side of the story, especially considering how his public image was controlled by the royal family and media for so long.
“Being able to take some of that (control) back by sharing — or not sharing — what you want on your own terms can be liberating and healing,” she said.
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So far, there has been no comment from Buckingham Palace or anyone who speaks for the royal family, a stance that has been lauded by much of the British media as a dignified silence.
— With a file from Reuters
Prince Harry memoir leak: Londoners react to ‘shocking’ claim of physical fight with William
Editor’s Note: Dr. Peggy Drexler is a research psychologist, documentary film producer and author, including two books about gender and family and the forthcoming “Mean,” a book about women behaving badly, to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2024. Her latest film, “King Coal,” will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers. View more opinion on CNN.
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The soap opera that is Prince Harry versus the British monarchy continued this week with the buzz surrounding the upcoming release of his memoir, “Spare.” Contents leaked from the book and released excerpts from his forthcoming interviews with “60 Minutes” and ITV offered some eyebrow-raising anecdotes and heightened the already-sharp tension between the Duke of Sussex and his wife, Meghan Markle, and the royal family. Lurid details aside, the most notable disclosures included new details about Harry’s relationship with his brother, Prince William, whom Harry apparently refers to in the book as his “arch nemesis.”
Courtesy of Peggy Drexler
Public interest in the royal family is at an all-time high — thanks to both real world events that include the loss of Queen Elizabeth II, the impending coronation of Harry’s father King Charles III and the resignation of former Prime Minister Liz Truss, and to the wild popularity of fictionalized series like “The Crown” — and Harry and Meghan are certainly capitalizing on that. Meanwhile, the royal family, including William, has remained silent.
Good for them. Where Harry may have once engendered some sympathy for having endured a lifetime of being the “spare” — the lesser of the two brothers, now fifth in line for the throne (coming in behind his 7-year-old niece, Princess Charlotte) — empathy is running short. Harry and Meghan quit the royal family amid complaints that they preferred a private life as “regular people,” no longer wanting the media attention that came with being royals, including being tabloid fodder. In an excerpt from an upcoming interview, Harry told ITV: “I want a family. Not an institution.”
And yet here they are, fully and willingly creating that fodder themselves.
And fodder it is. Among the gossipy allegations Harry lobs at his brother in “Spare” are details of a physical altercation between the two during which William knocked Harry to the floor and left him scratched and bruised, and claims that William and his wife, Kate Middleton, were the ones responsible for encouraging Harry’s controversial Nazi costume in 2005. Revelations in “Spare” also dish on Meghan’s relationship with Kate, including a claim that Kate demanded Meghan apologize for once suggesting she had “baby brain.” Buckingham Palace has repeatedly declined to comment on the book.
Penguin Random House worldwide
Through these disclosures, what we’re seeing is a little brother desperate to fight back against a lifetime of feeling inferior, but doing so in the dirtiest way possible. And, well, it seems pathetic.
Competition between children is common, and sibling rivalry between brothers even more so, especially when there are just two of them. Certainly, most aren’t born into families with set hierarchies that serve to remind them of their exact place. But brotherly discord has existed throughout time, inspiring countless works of art in all spheres (most of them tragedies). Harry is not special — his is one of the commonest dramas of human nature.
He’s also not a victim, nor blameless. While much has been made since their union began about Meghan’s influence on Harry’s defection from the family, by now it’s clear that he, wounded, went looking for what he needed: someone to help him separate from his family and, perhaps, someone who supported and understood his anger. He found it in her, a woman whose ambition drove her career as an actress and whose own family life included contentious relationships with her half-sister and her father; a woman who was not afraid to express herself, even to royalty.
It’s clear that Harry and Meghan are, at some level, trying to take control of the narrative about themselves after negative press coverage that brought misogyny and racism to bear on an already-toxic family dynamic. But Harry’s attempts now to heal those wounds by making public private family matters aren’t noble, and they won’t save him, either. In fact, through Harry’s revelations, one might now feel the most empathy for William, a man who was raised, from birth, with a set destiny, and, unlike Harry, few choices.
William will be king, and Harry will not. But whether that is something William desires, or something he’ll instead fulfill out of sheer patriotic and familial duty, is unknown. That’s because William is taking the high road of silence. Isn’t it ironic that we know so much more about Harry and Meghan, the couple who resigned from royal life because they wished to remain private, than the couple who opted to stay?
While we can, and should, have some disdain for how Harry has chosen to approach his life circumstances, it’s also possible to have some compassion for him — and understanding. He did not, after all, entirely create himself. And, sheltered and uber-privileged as he was for much of his upbringing, he is likely a fairly immature 38 year old.
Now, he’s pushing back against the machine that made him in the only way he knows how — and possibly doing so because it’s the only way he knows how to make his own money and live independently. He felt exploited as a child and younger adult; he’s now in turn profiting off his family (and earning an enormous amount of money in the process).
Perhaps someday we’ll hear from Harry as Harry, a man truly independent of the royal family from which he has claimed, time and again, he desperately wants to separate. Until then, we can likely expect more of the same negativity, blame, immaturity and victimization — qualities, in fact, quite unbecoming of a royal. But, then, Harry no longer is one.
Prince Harry told CBS’ 60 Minutes Sunday he hasn’t spoken with his brother, Prince William, for “a while,” in the second of two major interviews ahead of the publication of his memoir, “Spare” on Monday.
The Duke of Sussex told Anderson Cooper he doesn’t “currently” speak with the Prince of Wales, “but I look forward to us being able to find peace,” he said. It follows an interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby, ahead of what is likely to be an explosive week for the British royals with the release of Harry’s memoirs.
The interviews address a wide range of topics from the death of Prince Harry’s mother, the Princess of Wales, his frustration towards the British press, the treatment of his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and the subsequent fallout with his family since his marriage.
Buckingham Palace has repeatedly declined to comment on the contents of Prince Harry’s forthcoming memoir.
In the interview and in excerpts from his memoir shared by ITV, the Duke of Sussex addressed how strife in his family has been fueled by the relationship between Buckingham Palace and media outlets.
“We’re not just talking about family relationships, we’re talking about an antagonist, which is the British press, specifically the tabloids who want to create as much conflict as possible,” Prince Harry told Bradby. “The saddest part of that is certain members of my family and the people that work for them are complicit in that conflict.”
He also stated that the “leaking” and “planting” of “a royal source” to the press “is not an unknown person, it is the palace specifically briefing the press, but covering their tracks by being unnamed.”
Prince Harry added that he thinks “that’s pretty shocking to people. Especially when you realize how many palace sources, palace insiders, senior palace officials, how many quotes are being attributed to those people, some of the most heinous, horrible things have been said about me and my wife, completely condoned by the palace because it’s coming from the palace, and those journalists have literally been spoon-fed that narrative without ever coming to us, without ever seeing or questioning the other side.”
He spoke about how his mother was hunted by paparazzi, recalling the traumatic night his father told him Princess Diana had died from injuries sustained in a car crash.
“I don’t want history to repeat itself. I do not want to be a single dad. And I certainly don’t want my children to have a life without a mother or a father,” Prince Harry said in the interview.
The Duke of Sussex also talked about his decision to write the book, saying, “thirty-eight years of having my story told by so many different people, with intentional spin and distortion felt like a good time to tell own my story and be able to tell it for myself. I’m actually really grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to tell my story because it’s my story to tell.”
Prince Harry pointed out that he has tried over the last six years to resolve his concerns with his family privately.
“It never needed to get to this point. I have had conversations, I have written letters, I have written emails, and everything is just, ‘No, you, this is not what’s happening. You, you are imagining it,’” he said. “That’s really hard to take. And if it had stopped, by the point that I fled my home country with my wife and my son fearing for our lives, then maybe this would have turned out differently. It’s hard.”
The duke said he wants “reconciliation but first there needs to be some accountability,” with respect to his family.
“You can’t just continue to say to me that I’m delusional and paranoid when all the evidence is stacked up, because I was genuinely terrified about what is going to happen to me,” he said.
“And then we have a 12-month transition period and everyone doubles. My wife shares her experience. And instead of backing off, both the institution and the tabloid media in the UK, both doubled down,” he added.
Still, the duke said, “forgiveness is 100 percent a possibility,” during the interview.
“There’s probably a lot of people who, after watching the documentary and reading the book, will go, how could you ever forgive your family for what they have done? People have already said that to me. And I said forgiveness is 100% a possibility because I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back. At the moment, I don’t recognize them, as much as they probably don’t recognize me,” Prince Harry said.
On Monday, the duke’s interview with “Good Morning America” co-anchor Michael Strahan will air on the ABC show, followed in the evening by a half-hour special on ABC News Live. And to top things off, the duke will make an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” hours after his book is released on Tuesday.
With that all to come before the public is even able to get their hands on book, one has to wonder if there will be any revelations left to read. For days now, leaks from the upcoming tome have sparked headlines around the world.
It is now known the duke has made a slew of damaging accusations against the British royal family in “Spare” after several outlets obtained early copies of the book before the weekend. CNN has not seen a copy of the book but has requested an advance copy from the publisher Penguin Random House.
Perhaps the most incendiary revelation to emerge was Prince Harry’s claim of a scuffle with the Prince of Wales during an argument over his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2019, as he described while reading in an excerpt of his memoir on air on Sunday.
Prince Harry said his brother never tried to dissuade him from marrying Meghan, but expressed some concerns and told him, “‘This is going be really hard for you,’” Prince Harry recalled during his interview.
“I still to this day don’t truly understand which part of what he was talking about,” Prince Harry continued. “Maybe he predicted what the British press’s reaction was going to be.”
His relationship with Prince William is just one of a series of incredibly candid accounts of life as the “spare heir” in his memoir.The book’s title of “Spare” – a reference to a nickname the duke lived with while growing up. Prince Harry’s version of events also tackles his final moments with the late Queen Elizabeth II, his attempts to seek closure after his mother’s death, and other deeply personal conversations with members of “The Firm.”
One part of the book that is seeing some backlash is his reported remarks on killing 25 Taliban fighters during his time in the British Army in Afghanistan. In addition to disclosing the figure, the duke is also quoted as describing the insurgents as “chess pieces” taken off the board rather than people, according to UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
Prince Harry’s comments have prompted criticism from some British security and military figures – and an angry rebuke from the Taliban.
Before publicity ramped up around the duke’s book, the Sussexes had previously opened up about the challenges and hardships of royal life in their Netflix docuseries and to Oprah Winfrey.
In both those royal exposés, the couple outlined their acrimonious split with the House of Windsor and blamed the media for invasive, unrelenting coverage, particularly of Meghan.
The Sussexes announced in 2020 that they were stepping away from their roles as senior royals and planned to work towards becoming “financially independent.” The following year, the palace confirmed the couple had agreed with Queen Elizabeth II that they were not returning as working members of the royal family.
In the recent six-part Netflix documentary, Prince Harry didn’t hold back when he blamed the press for placing undue stress on his wife, saying it led to her having a miscarriage and suffering suicidal thoughts.
Meghan said she wanted to go somewhere for help but claimed she wasn’t allowed to because of the optics on the institution, without specifying who she believed stopped her. She made similar comments in her explosive 2021 interview with Winfrey.
Prince Harry may have “stepped back” from his royal duties in 2020, but he and his wife, Meghan, the duchess of Sussex, certainly haven’t stepped away from the spotlight. Just last month they appeared in a six-part Netflix documentary about their relationship and their decision to leave their royal lives behind. But now, the 38-year-old Prince Harry is telling his own story. In a new memoir, coming out Tuesday, called “Spare” — a nod to his backup role in the line of succession. The book is a stunning break with royal protocol. It’s a deeply personal account of Prince Harry’s decades-long struggle with grief after the death of his mother Princess Diana, and a revealing look at his fractured relationships with his father, King Charles, his stepmother, the Queen Consort Camilla, and his brother, Prince William, the heir to his spare.
Anderson Cooper: You write about a contentious meeting you had with him in 2021. You said, “I looked at Willy, really looked at him maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in, his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me, his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own, his famous resemblance to Mummy which was fading with time, with age.” That’s pretty cutting.
Prince Harry: I don’t see it as cutting at all. Um, you know, my brother and I love each other. I love him deeply. There has been a lot of pain between the two of us, especially the last six years. None of anything I’ve written, anything that I’ve included is ever intended to hurt my family. But it does give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up, and also squashes this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers.
Anderson Cooper: I think so many people around the world watched you and your brother grow up and feel like you two were inseparable. And yet in reading the book, you have lived separate lives from the time your mom died.
Prince Harry: Uh-huh (AFFIRM)
Anderson Cooper: Even when you were in the same school, in high school…
Prince Harry: Sibling rivalry.
Anderson Cooper: Your brother told you, “Pretend we don’t know each other.”
Prince Harry: Yeah, and at the time it hurt. I couldn’t make sense of it. I was like, “What do you mean? We’re now at the same school. Like, I haven’t seen you for ages, now we get to hang out together.” He’s like, “No, no, no, when we’re at school we don’t know each other.” And I took that personally. But yes, you’re absolutely right, you hit the nail on the head. Like, we had a very similar traumatic experience, and then we– we dealt with it two very different ways.
Prince Harry
Anderson Cooper: William had tried to talk to you occasionally about your mom, but, as a child you could not– you couldn’t respond.
Prince Harry: For me, it was never a case of, “I don’t want to talk about it with you.” I just don’t know how to talk about it. I never ever thought that maybe talking about it with my brother or with anybody else at that point would be therapeutic.
In August 1997, Harry and William were vacationing in Scotland with their father. Harry was 12, William, 15. They were asleep at Balmoral Castle on August 31st, when Harry was awakened by his father who told him his mother had been in a car crash in Paris.
Anderson Cooper: In the book you write, “He says, ‘They tried, darling boy. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.’ These phrases remain in my mind like darts on a board,” you say. Did– did you cry?
Prince Harry: No. No. Never shed a single tear at that point. I was in shock, you know? Twelve years old, sort of 7:00– 7:30 in the morning early. Your father comes in, sits on your bed, puts his hand on your knee and tells you “There’s been an accident.” I– I couldn’t believe.
Anderson Cooper: And you write in the book that, “Pa didn’t hug me. He wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances. But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said, ‘It’s going to be okay.’” But after that, nothing was okay for a long time.
Harry says his memories of the next few days are fragmented. But he does remember this: greeting mourners outside Kensington Palace in London the day before his mother’s funeral.
Anderson Cooper: When you see those videos now, what do you think?
Prince Harry: I think it’s bizarre, because I see William and me smiling. I remember the guilt that I felt.
Anderson Cooper: Guilt about?
Prince Harry: The fact that the people that we were meeting were showing more emotion than we were showing, maybe more emotion than we even felt.
Anderson Cooper: They were crying, but you weren’t.
Prince Harry: There was a lotta tears. I talk about how wet people’s hands were. And I couldn’t understand it at first.
Anderson Cooper: Their hands were wet from crying–
Prince Harry: Their hands were wet from wiping their own tears away. I do remember one of the strangest parts to it was taking flowers from people and then placing those flowers with the rest of them. As if I was some sort of middle person for their grief. And that really stood out for me.
The funeral, on a cool September morning, was watched by as many as 2.5 billion people around the world. Perhaps the most indelible image: Prince Harry and his brother, walking behind their mother’s casket on its way to Westminster Abbey.
Anderson Cooper: What do you remember about that walk?
Prince Harry: How quiet it was. I remember, the occasional wail and screaming of someone. I remember the horse hooves on the road.
Prince Harry: The bridles of the horses, the gun carriage, the wheels, the occasional gravel stone underneath your shoe. But mainly the– the silence.
After the service, Princess Diana’s body was brought for burial to her family’s ancestral estate, Althorp.
Prince Harry: Once my mother’s coffin actually went into the ground, that was the first time that I actually cried. Yeah, there was never another time.
Anderson Cooper: All through your teenage years, you did– you didn’t cry about it?
Prince Harry: No.
Anderson Cooper: You didn’t believe she was dead.
Prince Harry: Unh-uh (NEGATIVE). For a long– for a long time, I just refused to accept that she was– she was gone. Um, part of, you know, she would never do this to us, but also part of, maybe this is all part of a plan.
Anderson Cooper: I mean, you really believed that maybe she had just decided to disappear for a time?
Prince Harry: For a time, and then that she would call us and that we would go and join her, yeah.
Anderson Cooper: How long did you believe that?
Prince Harry: Years. Many, many years. And William and I talked about it as well. He had– he had um, similar thoughts.
Anderson Cooper: You write in the book, “I’d often say it to myself first thing in the morning, ‘Maybe this is the day. Maybe this is the day that she’s gonna reappear.’”
Prince Harry: Yeah, hope. I had huge amounts of hope
He held onto that hope into adulthood. When Harry was 20, he asked to see the police report about the crash that killed his mother, her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed and their driver Henri Paul while they were being pursued by paparazzi in a Paris tunnel.
Anderson Cooper: The files contained photographs of the crash scene. Why did you want to see it?
Prince Harry: Mainly proof. Proof that she was in the car. Proof that she was injured. And proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the ones that were taking photographs– photographs of her lying half dead on the back seat of the car.
Anderson Cooper: You write in the book, “I hadn’t been aware before this moment,” talking about looking at the pictures of the crash scene, “that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flash bulb.”
Prince Harry: Yep
Anderson Cooper: That’s what you saw in the pictures?
Prince Harry: Uh-huh (AFFIRM) (good face). Well they were – the pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographs taking photographs through the window, and the reflection on the window was– was them.
He only saw some of the crash photos, his private secretary and advisor dissuaded him from looking at the rest.
Prince Harry: All I saw was the back of my mum’s head– slumped on the back seat. There were other more gruesome photographs, but I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that. Because that’s the kinda stuff that sticks in your mind forever.
Harry says he believed his mother might stillbe alive until he was 23 and visited Paris for the first time.
Anderson Cooper: You told your driver, “I want to go to the tunnel where my mom died?”
Prince Harry: I wanted to see whether it was possible driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving that you could lose control of a car and plow into a pillar killing almost everybody in that car. I need to take this journey. I need to ride the same route–
Anderson Cooper: The same tunnel, the same speed–
Prince Harry: All of it.
Anderson Cooper: –your mother was going.
Prince Harry: Yup. Because William and I had already been told, “The event was like a bicycle chain. If you remove one of those chains, the end result would not have happened.” And the paparazzi chasing was part of that. But yet, everybody got away with it.
Harry writes he and his brother weren’t satisfied with the results of a 2006 investigation by London’s Metropolitan Police, concluding Diana’s driver, Henri Paul, had been drinking and the crash was a “tragic accident.”
Prince Harry: William and I considered reopening the inquest. Because there were so many gaps and so many holes in it. Which just didn’t add up and didn’t make sense.
Anderson Cooper: Would you still like to do that?
Prince Harry: I don’t even know if it’s an option now. But no, I think– brrrr– would I like to do that now? It’s a hell of a question, Anderson.
Anderson Cooper: Do you feel you have the answers that you need to have about what happened to your mom?
Prince Harry: Truth be known, no. I don’t think I do. And I don’t think my brother does either. I don’t think the world does. Um – do I need any more than I already know? No. I don’t think it would change much.
Harry now says it wasn’t until he served in combat with the British Army in Afghanistan that he finally found purpose and a sense of normalcy.
Prince Harry: My military career saved me in many regard.
Anderson Cooper: How so?
Prince Harry: Got me out of the spotlight from the– from the U.K. press. I was able to focus on a purpose larger than myself, to be wearing the same uniform as everybody else, to feel normal for the first time in my life. And accomplish some of the biggest challenges that I ever had. You know, I was training to become an Apache helicopter pilot. You don’t get a pass for being a prince.
Anderson Cooper: The Apache doesn’t give a crap about who you are.
Prince Harry: No, there’s– there’s no prince autopilot button you (LAUGH) can press and just whff– takes you away. I was a really good candidate for the military. I was a young man in my 20s suffering from shock. But I was now in the front seat of an Apache shooting it, flying it, monitoring four radios simultaneously and being there to save and help anybody that was on the– on the ground with a radio screaming, “We need support, we need air support.” That was my calling. I felt healing from that weirdly.
Anderson Cooper: And that multi-tasking the brain work of that, that felt good to you?
Prince Harry: It felt like I was turning pain into a purpose. I didn’t have the awareness at the time that I was living my life in adrenaline, and that was the case from age 12, from the moment that I was told that my mom had died.
Anderson Cooper: you say, “War didn’t begin in Afghanistan. It began in August 1997.”
Prince Harry: Yeah. The war for me unknowingly was when my mum died.
Anderson Cooper: Who were you fighting?
Prince Harry: Myself. I had a huge amount of frustration and blame towards the British press for their part in it.
Anderson Cooper: Even at 12 at that young you were feeling that toward the British press?
Prince Harry: Yeah. I mean, it was obvious to us as kids the British press’ part in our mother’s misery and I had a lot of anger inside of me that luckily, I never expressed to anybody. But I resorted to drinking heavily. Because I wanted to numb the feeling, or I wanted to distract myself from how… whatever I was thinking. And I would, you know, resort to drugs as well.
Harry admits he smoked pot and used cocaine. And he writes that in his late 20s he felt “hopeless” and “lost.”
Prince Harry: There was this weight on my chest that I felt for so many years that I was never able to cry. So I was constantly trying to find a way to cry, but– in even sitting on my sofa and going over as many memories as I could muster up about my mum. And sometimes I watched videos online.
Anderson Cooper: Of your mom?
Prince Harry: Of my mum.
Anderson Cooper: Hoping to cry?
Prince Harry: Yup.
Anderson Cooper: And you couldn’t.
Prince Harry: I couldn’t.
He sought out help from a therapist for the first time seven years ago. And he reveals he’s also tried more experimental treatments.
Anderson Cooper: You write in the book about psychedelics, Ayahuasca, psilocybin, mushrooms.
Prince Harry: I would never recommend people to do this recreationally. But doing it with the right people if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss, grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine.
Anderson Cooper: They showed you something. What did they show you?
Prince Harry: For me, they cleared the windscreen, the windshield the misery of loss. They cleared away this idea that I had in my head that– that my mother, that I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her. When in fact, all she wanted was for me to be happy.
Prince Harry says he’s found that happiness with his wife in California, but he’s far from at peace with the royal family.
Harry’s memoir “Spare”, is anything but spare in its unflattering portrayal of the royal family, especially his stepmother, Camilla, now the queen consort. She married then-Prince Charles in 2005, though the two had been romantically involved on and off for decades. When Princess Diana famously referred to Camilla as the third person in her marriage, the British tabloids ran with it, and Prince Harry has never forgotten.
Prince Harry: She was the villain. She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image.
Anderson Cooper: You and your brother both directly asked your dad not to marry Camilla?
Prince Harry: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: Why?
Prince Harry: We didn’t think it was necessary. We thought that it was gonna cause more harm than good and that if he was now with his person, that– surely that’s enough. Why go that far when you don’t necessarily need to? We wanted him to be happy. And we saw how happy he was with her. So, at the time, it was, “Ok.”
Anderson Cooper: You wrote that she started a campaign in the British press to pave the way for a marriage. And you wrote, “I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.” How was she dangerous?
Prince Harry: Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image.
Anderson Cooper: That made her dangerous?
Prince Harry: That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.
Harry says over the years, he was one of those bodies. He accuses Camilla and even his father, at times, of using him or William to get better tabloid coverage for themselves. Prince Harry writes, Camilla, “sacrificed me on her personal P.R. altar.”
Prince Harry: If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re gonna do.
In his book, Harry writes that when he introduced Meghan Markle to his family in 2016, his father initially took a liking to her, but William was skeptical, disdainfully referring to Meghan as “an American actress.” Though Harry doesn’t specify who – he says other members of the royal family were uneasy as well.
Prince Harry: Right from the beginning, before they even had a chance to get to know her. And the U.K. press jumped on that. And here we are.
Anderson Cooper: And what was that based on, that mistrust?
Prince Harry: The fact that she was American, an actress, divorced, Black, biracial with a Black mother. Those were just four of the typical stereotypes that is– becomes a feeding frenzy for the British press.
Anderson Cooper: But all those things within the family also were– were sources of mistrust,
Prince Harry: Yes. You know, my family read the tabloids, you know? It’s laid out– at breakfast when everyone comes together. So, whether you walk around saying you believe it or not, it’s still– it’s still leaving an imprint in your mind. So if you have that judgment based on a stereotype right at the beginning, it’s very, very hard to get over that. And a large part of it for the family, but also the British press and numerous other people is, like, “He’s changed. She must be a witch. He’s changed.” As opposed to yeah, I did change, and I’m really glad I changed. Because rather than getting drunk, falling out of clubs, taking drugs, I had now found the love of my life, and I now had the opportunity to start a family with her.
Soon after their relationship became public, Harry insisted on putting out a statement condemning some of the tabloid coverage of Meghan and what he called quote “the racial undertones of comment pieces.”
Anderson Cooper: You write that your dad and your brother, William, were furious with you for doing that. Why?
Prince Harry: They felt as though it made them look bad. They felt as though they didn’t have a chance or weren’t able to do that for their partners. What Meghan had to go through was similar in some part to what Kate and what Camilla went through, very different circumstances. But then you add in the race element, which was what the press– British press jumped on straight away. I went into this incredibly naïve. I had no idea the British press were so bigoted. Hell, I was probably bigoted before–
Anderson Cooper: You– you–
Prince Harry: –the relationship with– with Meghan.
Anderson Cooper: You think you were bigoted before the relationship with Meghan.
Prince Harry: I– I don’t know. Put it this way, I didn’t see what I now see.
They were married in May 2018, in a ceremony that seemed to promise a more modern and inclusive royal family — and given the titles duke and duchess of Sussex. But behind the scenes, according to Harry, William’s mistrust of Meghan only worsened.
Anderson Cooper: Did you ever try to meet with William and Kate to try to defuse the tension?
In early 2019, Harry writes, the rancor between William and him exploded at Harry’s cottage on the grounds of Kensington Palace.
Anderson Cooper: Your arguments with your brother became physical.
Prince Harry: It was a buildup of– frustration, I think, on his part. It was at a time where he was being told certain things by people within his office. And at the same time, he was consuming a lot of the tabloid press, a lot of the stories. And he had a few issues, which were based not on reality. And I was defending my wife. And he was coming for my wife– she wasn’t there at the time– but through the things that he was saying. I was defending myself. And we moved from one room into the kitchen. And his frustrations were growing, and growing, and growing. He was shouting at me. I was shouting back at him. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t pleasant at all. And he snapped. And he pushed me to the floor.
Anderson Cooper: He knocked you over?
Prince Harry: He knocked me over. I landed on the dog bowl.
Anderson Cooper: You cut your back.
Prince Harry: Yeah. I cut my back. I didn’t know about it at the time. But, yeah, he– he apologized afterwards. It was a pretty nasty experience, but—
Anderson Cooper: He asked you not to tell anybody– not to tell Meghan?
Prince Harry: Yeah. And– and I wouldn’t have done. And, I didn’t until she– until she saw on the– on my back. She goes, “What’s that?” I was like, “Huh, what?” I actually didn’t know what she was talking about. I looked in the mirror. I was like, “Oh s***.” Well, ’cause I’d never s-I hadn’t seen it.
Meghan has said constant criticism and pressure led her in the winter of 2019 to contemplate suicide.
Prince Harry: The thing that’s terrified me the most is history repeating itself.
Anderson Cooper: You really feared that your wife, Meghan…
Prince Harry: Yes, I feared, I feared a lot that the end result, the fact that I lost my mum when I was 12 years old, could easily happen again to my wife.
In January 2020, Prince Harry and Meghan announced they intended to, in their words, step back as senior members of the royal family. They moved to California three months later. Then there was the headline-grabbing interview with Oprah Winfrey and a deal with Netflix worth a reported $100 million. Critics say the duke and duchess are cashing in on their royal titles while they still can.
Anderson Cooper: Why not renounce your titles as duke and duchess?
Prince Harry: And what difference would that make?
Anderson Cooper: One of the criticisms that you’ve received is that okay, fine, you wanna move to California, you wanna step back from the institutional role. Why be so public? Why reveal conversations you’ve had with your father or– with your brother? You say you tried to do this privately.
Prince Harry: And every single time I’ve tried to do it privately there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife. You know, the family motto is never complain, never explain. But it’s just a motto. And it doesn’t really hold–
Anderson Cooper: There’s a lotta complaining and a lot of explaining.
Prince Harry: Endless–
Anderson Cooper: Private– being done in– through leaks.
Prince Harry: Through leaks.
Prince Harry continues to claim he would never leak against his family.
Prince Harry: So now, trying to speak a language that perhaps they understand, I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth, rather than using someone else, an unnamed source, to feed in lies or a narrative to a tabloid media that literally radicalizes its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids.
Last month, the British tabloid The Sun published a vicious column about Meghan written by a tv host.
Anderson Cooper: He said, “I hate her. At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day where she is made to walk naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame,’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.” Did that surprise you?
Prince Harry: Did it surprise me? No. Is it shocking? Yes. I mean, thank you for proving our point.
Anderson Cooper: Has there been any response from the palace
Prince Harry: No. And there comes a point when silence is betrayal
Harry has been back in the United Kingdom. He was in London last September for a charity event when the palace announced his grandmother, the queen, was under medical supervision at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
Prince Harry: I asked my brother– I said, “What are your plans? How are you and Kate getting up there?” And then, a couple of hours later, you know, all of the fam– family members that live within the Windsor and Ascot area were jumping on a plane together, a plane with 12, 14, maybe 16 seats.
Anderson Cooper: You were not invited on that plane?
Prince Harry: I was not invited.
By the time Harry got to Balmoral on his own, the queen was dead.
Prince Harry: I walked into the hall, and my aunt was there to greet me. And she asked me if I wanted to see her. I thought about it for about five seconds, thinking, “Is this a good idea?” And I was, like, “You know what? You can– you can do this. You– you need to say goodbye.” So I went upstairs, took my jacket off and walked in and just spent some time with her alone.
Anderson Cooper: Where was she?
Prince Harry: She was in her bedroom. I was actually– I was really happy for her. Because she’d finished life. She’d completed life, and her husband was– was waiting for her. And the two of them are buried together.
As they had 25 years earlier, Harry and William found themselves walking together, but apart, this time behind their grandmother’s casket.
Anderson Cooper: Do you speak to William now? Do you text?
Prince Harry: Currently, no. But I look forward to– I look forward to us being able to find peace. I want—
Anderson Cooper: How long has it been since you spoke?
Prince Harry: A while.
Anderson Cooper: Do you speak to your dad?
Prince Harry: We aren’t– we haven’t spoken for quite a while. No, not recently.
Anderson Cooper: Can you see a day when you would return as a full-time member of the royal family?
Prince Harry: No. I can’t see that happening.
Anderson Cooper: In the book, you called this, “A– full-scale rupture.” Can it be healed?
Prince Harry: Yes. The ball is very much in their court, but, you know, Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologize for anything that we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, no one’s telling us sp– the specifics or anything. There needs to be a constructive conversation, one that can happen in private that doesn’t get leaked.
Anderson Cooper: I assume they would say, “Well, how can we trust you how do we know that you’re not gonna reveal whatever conversations we have in an interview somewhere?”
Prince Harry: This all started with them briefing, daily, against my wife with lies to the point of where my wife and I had to run away from our count– my country.
Anderson Cooper: It’s hard, I think, for anybody to imagine a family dynamic that is so “Game of Thrones” without dragons.
Prince Harry: I don’t watch “Game of Thrones,” but–
Anderson Cooper: Oh. Okay.
Prince Harry: –there’s def– but there’s definitely dragons. And that’s again the third party which is the British Press so ultimately without the British press as part of this, we would probably still be a fairly dysfunctional family, like, a lot are. But at the heart of it, there is a family, without question. Um – and I really look forward to having that family element back. I look forward to having a relationship with my brother. I look forward to having a relationship with my father and other members of my family.
Anderson Cooper: You want that?
Prince Harry: That’s all I’ve ever asked for.
We reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. Its representatives demanded that before considering responding, 60 Minutes provide them with our report prior to airing it tonight, which is something we never do.
Produced by Draggan Mihailovich. Associate producer, Emily Cameron. Broadcast associate, Eliza Costas. Edited by Warren Lustig.
Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006. His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s pre-eminent newsmen.
Allies of Britain’s royal family pushed back Saturday against claims made by Prince Harry in his new memoir, which paints the monarchy as a cold and callous institution that failed to nurture or support him.
Buckingham Palace hasn’t officially commented on the book. But British newspapers and websites brimmed with quotes from unnamed “royal insiders,” rebutting Harry’s accusations. One said his public attacks on the royal family took a “toll” on the health of Queen Elizabeth II, who died in September.
Veteran journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, a biographer and friend of King Charles III, said Harry’s revelations were the type “that you’d expect? from a sort of B-list celebrity,” and that the king would be pained and frustrated by them.
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“His concern is to act as head of state for a nation which we all know is in pretty troubled condition,” Dimbleby told the BBC. “I think he will think this gets in the way.“
Harry’s book, “Spare,” is the latest in a string of very public pronouncements by the prince and his wife Meghan since they quit royal life and moved to California in 2020, citing what they saw as the media’s racist treatment of Meghan, who is biracial, and a lack of support from the palace. It follows an interview with Oprah Winfrey and a six-part Netflix documentary released last month.
Prince Harry memoir leak: Londoners react to ‘shocking’ claim of physical fight with William
Harry is not the first British royal to air family secrets _ both his parents used the media as their marriage fell apart. Charles cooperated on Dimbleby’s 1994 book and accompanying television documentary, which revealed that the then heir to the throne had had an affair during his marriage to Princess Diana.
Diana gave her side of the story in a BBC interview the following year, famously saying “there were three of us in this marriage” in reference to Charles’ relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
But “Spare” goes into far more detail about private conversations and personal grievances than any previous royal revelation.
In the ghostwritten memoir, Harry discusses his grief at the death of his mother in 1997 and his long-simmering resentment at the role of royal “spare,” overshadowed by the “heir” _ older brother Prince William. He recounts arguments and a physical altercation with William, reveals how he lost his virginity (in a field) and describes using cocaine and cannabis.
He also says he killed 25 Taliban fighters while serving as an Apache helicopter pilot in Afghanistan _ a claim criticized by both the Taliban and British military veterans.
“Spare” is due to be published around the world on Tuesday. The Associated Press obtained an early Spanish-language copy.
Harry has said he expects counterattacks from the palace. He has long complained of “leaks” and “plants” of stories to the media by members of the royal household.
In an interview due to be broadcast on ITV on Sunday _ one of several he has recorded to promote the book _ Harry says people who accuse him of invading his family’s privacy “don’t understand or don’t want to believe that my family have been briefing the press.”
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“I don’t know how staying silent is ever going to make things better,” he said.
London — In his forthcoming autobiography, Spare, Prince Harry says that his brother, heir to the throne Prince William, physically attacked him in 2019, according to a report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. The Guardian says it viewed a copy of Harry’s book, which is due out next Tuesday. CBS News has not seen a copy of Spare and is not able to independently verify the report.
According to the Guardian, William went to meet Harry at his then residence on the grounds of Kensington Palace, Nottingham Cottage, wishing to discuss “the whole rolling catastrophe” of their struggles with the media and their personal relationship.
When he arrived, Harry said, William was already angry and started “parrot[ing] the press narrative,” calling Meghan “abrasive,” “difficult,” and “rude.”
William reportedly said Harry was not being rational, and Harry accused his older brother of acting like an heir and refusing to understand why Harry wasn’t happy to be treated poorly, just because he was not the next in line for the throne. William reportedly said he was trying to help Harry, who scoffed, further angering William, who moved towards him, swearing.
The book apparently describes Harry then going into the kitchen and giving William a glass of water.
“He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me,” Harry writes, according to the Guardian. “It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”
Harry said that William urged him to hit him back, referencing fights they had as kids, but Harry refused, so William left but then returned, “looking regretful, and apologized.”
Harry said he didn’t immediately tell Meghan about the fight, but did tell his therapist. When Meghan later noticed the scrapes on his back, he told her, and “she was terribly sad.”
There was no comment from Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace or the publisher of Spare, Penguin Random House, in response to the Guardian report.
The book recounts another meeting of the brothers, according to the Guardian, this time with their father, now King Charles III, after the funeral of the late husband of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Phillip, in April 2021.
According to the Guardian report, Harry says Charles stood between his two angry sons and said: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.”
Two interviews ahead of the official release of Harry’s book are expected this weekend, one with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” and the other with British broadcaster ITV News.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, which will air in full on Sunday, Harry says he tried to resolve the conflicts with his family in private, but that the palace used the media against him and Meghan. In a clip from the ITV interview, which also airs Sunday, he seems to suggest that he would like to reconcile.
“The door is always open,” Harry says. “The ball is in their court.”
